[HN Gopher] Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters (2...
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       Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters (2020)
        
       Author : colinbartlett
       Score  : 12 points
       Date   : 2025-05-10 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.vintagecomputing.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.vintagecomputing.com)
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Discussed at the time (of the article):
       | 
       |  _Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24433135 - Sept 2020 (139
       | comments)
        
       | ourmandave wrote:
       | Because you we're lucky to even get 40 columns (80 with an
       | expansion card)?
        
       | sillystu04 wrote:
       | I wish modern computers considered casing to be purely a matter
       | of style, such that "S" == "s" evaluates to true.
       | 
       | Casing is rarely semantically important, so case sensitivity is
       | widely ignored. But in many circumstances this gets implemented
       | in a haphazard way. For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com
       | and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.
       | 
       | Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward,
       | particularly with German.
       | 
       | Sadly it's too late to change this because doing so would be such
       | a breaking change.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | I like that I can write:                   Window* window = new
         | Window(...)
        
           | sillystu04 wrote:
           | You probably don't like this:                 String string =
           | ...
        
       | WalterBright wrote:
       | Back in 1978, I made my own keyboard for a single board 6800
       | computer I designed, also because I could not afford a keyboard.
       | 
       | I went to a surplus store and bought an EBCDIC keyboard for a
       | couple bucks. I unsoldered all the keys from the circuit board. I
       | took a plastic board, and using the old circuit board, drilled
       | holes in it. Inserted the keys in the holes, and then wired it up
       | in an 8x8 grid pattern. The two 8 bits gave 64 possible keys,
       | which was enough, connecting those to an I/O port enabled
       | recognizing which key was down.
       | 
       | It worked fine as long as you were careful not to press more than
       | one key at a time.
       | 
       | I don't recall what I did with that computer. It's all gone,
       | including the design notebook for it.
        
       | WalterBright wrote:
       | Sometimes you only had upper case because the character generator
       | was a 5*7 grid which wasn't really good enough to display lc.
        
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       (page generated 2025-05-10 23:00 UTC)